In the Family Way

I loved the character of Bea in this book. She is the center and no one ever considers that she might find it difficult or tiring to be the calm in the center of the ever widening storm. She is somehow able to pick herself up after whatever new twist is thrown at her and to be an anchor for the whole family tree.This book is fun and smart and full of love of family, in all its forms. Family is all and the children will be protected. Any book by Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a gift. This one comes with a bow of humor.

In the Family Way is above all a novel of family values. Family values without the quotation marks that make that description sarcastic or ironic. True, Bea is divorced from Roy, who is divorced from Serena, who is now in a relationship with Bea's sister, but calling on Roy to "supply" her with sperm so that she and May can have a child together. And so on and so forth. But this is a family that stays together, and Bea is the glue that binds this tribe to one another. As she says to Roy, when he first confesses his love for another woman, "A divorce is a piece of paper. I'm not going to fuss over that. A family is something else. There's no need to destroy a family. Where were you planning to go?" With that, Roy finds himself ensconced in an apartment three stories below, where he can still see Central Park from his windows and more important, still see his children daily. And where his new wife quickly becomes enmeshed in the extended family. This splendidly sophisticated comedy has a cast of characters large enough to require a diagrammatic family tree, which Lynne Sharon Schwartz thoughtfully supplies at the front of the book. The reader won't need to keep referring back though - Schwartz is too accomplished a writer for that. Having read several other novels by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, in particular, the hauntingly somber Disturbances in the Field, I was curious to read a novel by her that critics had described as "comic." (And, I admit, curious in addition as I'd written a novel with a very similar title, also about an alternative family.) I bought In the Family Way in hardcover, without even cracking that cover. It was worth every cent. This review doesn't do justice to the author's facility with words and her delightful - if hitherto hidden - comic sensibility. To appreciate those, you'll have to read the book.

This book was a lot of fun to read, a smart, funny, sharp escape. Schwartz does a great job of moving back and forth between the characters, creating situations that are over the top yet plauisble. A great book to have fun with.

I've read all of Lynne Sharon Schwartz's work, and although this might be her lightest book, its characterizations and the way Schwartz plays them off one another is dead-on. The social and familial milieu she describes might be comical, as the subtitle suggests, but it is also an urban reality. She manages to be merciless on her characters but treat them with respect and compassion all the same. I slightly missed the intellectual concerns and some of the language of earlier books, but there is a joyfulness in this one that makes it well worth the read.

A great book--Schwartz's patented wit, alternately warm and razor-sharp, in this new novel ventures into madcap humor, with complete success. The extended family of In the Family Way is like no other,and the kinship chart in the front of the book is so seemingly improbably interwoven it's a wonder to read the novel and see how it all makes a kind of strange and compelling sense. Be prepared to laugh a lot, and be moved.